How one Irish nun sparked a sectarian war in Australia

Sectarianism is a word often associated with the communal divide in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. However, 100 years ago, it could also be applied to describe communal differences in Australia.
When the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788, it brought not only convicts and their gaolers but also the baggage of religious hostility and ethnic antagonism that had existed for centuries between Irish Catholics and British Protestants.
For the most part sectarian tensions in Australia simmered below the surface. But every now and then they bubbled up and boiled over, sometimes around the Twelfth of July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, as in Melbourne in 1846 when shots were fired, or on St Patrick’s Day, as in Sydney in 1878 when rioting broke out.
Nevertheless, the sectarian conflict in Australia was mostly rhetorical, usually erupting when Catholics demanded redress of their grievances, most notably government funding of Catholic schools, or when the Irish in Ireland stepped up their campaign for self-government.
Thus, when Australian Catholics of Irish descent threw their support behind the Home Rule movement their loyalty was called into question. A Protestant newspaper, the Australian Christian World, told its readers in 1910 that “there is very widespread conviction that the loyalty of Roman Catholics to the British Crown is of the thinnest quality and may in time prove the undoing of Australia.”
Australian sectarianism was not a one-way street. Many Protestants felt affronted by what they perceived as the Catholic Church’s commitment to an attitude of estrangement from aspects of Australian society: insisting that it alone was the repository of religious truth, thus precluding ecumenical engagement; adopting marriage laws that discouraged marriage across religious lines; and maintaining a separate education system.
When the first World War broke out, sectarianism was set aside as Catholics and Protestants supported the war effort and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. However, the sectarian truce was shattered following the Easter Rising in 1916 and the divide was exacerbated when the Australian government attempted to introduce conscription, which the Australian Irish strongly opposed.
Charges of disloyalty and plotting to overthrow the Empire emerged. The growing anti-Catholic animus in Australia intensified after Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne described the war as “an ordinary trade war”.
Australia emerged from the first World War a country deeply divided along religious, ethnic and class lines. The outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in 1919 and its escalation in 1920 following the introduction of the Black and Tans, served to widen those divisions. The increasing ferocity of the struggle in Ireland was reflected in the intensification of local sectarian conflicts.
At this time an extraordinary series of events occurred that saw sectarian tension in Australia reach its highest level ever – then or since. On a frosty winter’s night in July 1920, an Irish-born nun of the Presentation order Sister Liguori (aka Bridget Partridge) fled her convent in Wagga Wagga, a rural town in New South Wales, dressed only in her nightdress, fearful she was about to be murdered by her Mother Superior. When she placed herself under the protection of the Orange Lodge it sparked a sectarian war that played out in the press, the Parliament, and at protest meetings across the country, dividing the Australian nation still recovering from the bitter debates over the war and conscription and riven by the violent struggle for Irish independence.
Arrested as a lunatic at the request of her bishop, Sister Liguori was declared sane by the Lunacy Court and released. She then sued the bishop for damages in the Supreme Court in a case that lasted two weeks and attracted the attention of the press across Australia and around the world.
In Parliament, demands by opposition members for an inquiry into Catholic convents led to threats of violence between Catholic and Protestant MPs. When the nun’s brother kidnapped her off a suburban Sydney street, intending to take her back to her family in Ireland, the police intervened. But when the brother was allowed to leave the country without charge, the opposition moved a censure motion that threatened to bring down the Labor government.
Eventually, calm was restored, and from the mid-1920s sectarianism in Australia gradually declined. With the Catholic church shelving its campaign for state aid and the resolution of the Irish question to the satisfaction of the Australian Irish, who were strongly pro-Treaty, the causes of ethno-religious rivalry ceased to influence public debate in Australia.
Bridget Partridge lived out the rest of her life with her Protestant friends. She died in 1966 in Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital and was buried at Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery.
A former pupil of the Wagga Wagga convent school was the sole mourner at the funeral of the nun who once divided the Australian nation.
Dr Jeff Kildea is honorary professor in Irish Studies at the University of New South Wales and has written extensively on the history of the Irish in Australia. His most recent book is Sister Liguori: The Nun who Divided a Nation, available at connorcourtpublishing.com